Op-Ed: The Bin Laden Hoax

An article looking at the way conspiracy theorists view the US raid on Bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan and his death at the hands of Navy Seals.

Video seized at the secret compound in Pakistan where Bin Laden was shot dead by US Navy Seals.

U.S. Department of Defense

Osama Bin Laden is dead, the evidence for that is now absolutely overwhelming. Firstly, the President of the United States told us he is dead, and he wouldn’t lie to us. Secondly, although the photographic and video evidence has not been and probably will not be released to the general public, we have too considerable physical evidence. There is the remains of a helicopter at the compound where Bin Laden was hiding, and the physical destruction within the compound itself. We have video evidence of what appears to be Bin Laden watching himself on TV; and the Pakistani authorities are holding his widows in custody, although to date very little of what these women have told their gaolers has been released.

With all that evidence, no reasonable person can dispute the fact that the world’s most wanted man has now got what he deserved. We can argue that he should have been tried first, and then executed, but no one, no reasonably intelligent person, can dispute the fact that he has now been expunged from the face of the Earth.

Alas, there will always be people who don’t see things quite that way, because although it is now accepted that Bin Laden is dead, what is not accepted by the lunatic fringe is that he died on the date and in the manner described. It was all an elaborate hoax; the Americans didn’t violate Pakistani sovereignty and create discord with an essential ally in the struggle against Islamist terrorism. Barack Obama – whom some of the crazies view as the first Moslem President and others as a puppet of international Zionism – staged it all, or perhaps his controllers did, and he was simply reading a cue card. How do we know this? Because Bin Laden has been dead for years, that’s how.

The Infowars website has nailed its flag to the mast with an article by Paul Joseph Watson: 10 Facts That Prove The Bin Laden Fable Is a Contrived Hoax; “fact” number one is that Alex Jones has been told more than once including by (anonymous) high level sources that Bin Laden was long dead and that “his death would be announced at the most politically opportune moment.”

Of course, if Obama (or his controllers) were that smart, they’d realise that the most politically opportune moment hasn’t yet arrived; that would surely be sometime after the beginning of the next Presidential race. With the recent news, Obama’s stock has risen immensely with all mainstream America, but a lot can happen between now and the next election. Even if Obama were able, it wouldn’t make sense to stage such a hoax now, or could it be, as financial analyst Max Keiser quipped, that Goldman Sachs are behind it, that they are so desperate to keep down the price of silver, they defrosted Bin Laden and threw him into the ocean to deflect attention?

Between the earnest conspiracy mongering of Prison Planet and Infowars and the frippery of Max Keiser, there were very real reasons for believing the world’s most wanted man to have been long dead. First, there was a $25 million dollar bounty on his head; that is a massive temptation to even the most trusted of friendships, and Bin Laden, an extremely distinctively individual, would have been unable to remain hidden for so long without considerable assistance. The more people who know a secret, the greater the chance of someone letting something slip, and not only was Uncle Sam monitoring all electronic communications constantly, but the CIA and other intelligence agencies have armies of agents and informants – paid and otherwise – who would surely have tracked him down long since if he really were still alive.

There was also the very real possibility that Bin Laden had died from natural causes; there was, or appeared to be, strong evidence that he was physically not a well man. Lastly, there was also the very real possibility that he had been killed in Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda had not let on, because the Bin Laden myth is one that has been useful both to the neo-cons and to the Islamists.

Now we know the truth, he managed to survive for so long because he hid himself away less a recluse than a prisoner. He appears to have lived in a well fortified but far from luxurious compound for years, probably never even venturing out of his house for fear of being seen and recognised. He was protected by and his true identity known to only his closest and most trusted of intimates, including his wives, one of whom appears to have been ready to lay down her life for him. But he made mistakes, the lack of a telephone line to the compound raised suspicions, as did the methodical burning of rubbish. We can speculate as to how much Pakistani intelligence knew and what exactly they passed on to the Americans, but there can be no real doubt that what Obama told the world on May 1 was the essential truth, that Navy Seals had flown into Pakistan under radar, raided his Abbotabad compound, killed Bin Laden, taken his body to the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, and after taking the necessary forensic samples and photographic documentation, dumped it in the Indian Ocean.

The truth about Bin Laden’s decade long evasion of retribution and his death has something in common with the ludicrous myths and conspiracy so-called “theories” about 9/11; it is so prosaic it defies belief. To this day people believe 9/11 was an inside job because the idea that 18 men with box cutters could have evaded the most sophisticated security systems in the world and perpetrated four synchronised atrocities is unworthy of belief. And they know the government lies to us all the time, so of course, if the government says that’s how it happened, then clearly it didn’t.

David Icke is another conspiracy monger who has just released an enchanting video called Be Wary of Digital Deception. Very timely, because we have just seen a striking example of such (albeit humorously innocent) deception when an Orthodox Jewish newspaper published a photograph of Obama and his team watching the raid on Bin Laden in the White House situation room with Hillary Clinton airbrushed out because of her feminine wiles. It had to be a Jewish newspaper! But this is nothing new, the manipulation of photography and thence of history precedes the digital age, and is almost as old as photography itself. Probably the most famous examples of such manipulation are the airbrushing of Trotsky from Soviet photographs after his fall from grace. Sometimes people are added to photographs rather than removed. The American con man William Mumler was indicted for ripping off the gullible by producing spirit photographs as long ago as 1869. A notorious example from our own century is the insertion of Jane Fonda – Hanoi Jane - into a photograph of decorated Vietnam veteran John Kerry during his 2004 Presidential campaign.

There is also the little matter of what has been called the changing narrative of the raid, which may or may not be due entirely to the fog of war. We were told initially that Bin Laden had resisted, that he was going for his gun, but the truth is that he was executed, and would probably have still been executed if he had been found asleep or naked in the shower.

The problem is that once supposed facts are released to the media they can be corrected but never unspoke. In June 2001, two DJs – in Dallas of all places – reported that the singer Britney Spears and her boyfriend had been killed in a car crash in California. The rumour spread like wildfire, and soon police and fire departments were inundated with calls from as far afield as Australia and New Zealand. This was clearly a joke that backfired, but there are probably some people out there who believe Britney Spears really is dead and has been substituted by some mysterious intelligence agency as part of a long term plan to subvert the American way of life.